Google Advertising versus Facebook Advertising
Carey
Advertising doesn’t have to be a tricky place, it just takes some willingness from you to have a go. Talking about Google and Facebook advertising specifically, these platforms have a whole world of data to help you improve your advertising and get a better return on your investment.
Let’s get straight down to it; our recommendation is that you are on both platforms for advertising. They each have their pros and cons but both give you access to a different kind of audience, widening your reach.
Google is where potential customers are searching for you; Facebook is where you need to convince people they need to be searching for you.
Google AdWords
You know the first few results on the Google results page with a little ‘AD’ next to them? They are examples of Google AdWords adverts. These display adverts on Google, and its advertising networks, help to promote your salon business.
People with ‘intent’ are on Google looking for a product or service, whether it’s an answer to a question ‘why is my hair dry?’, ‘what are the best straightening balms to use?’, or they may be searching for a service, ‘hairdressers near me’, ‘good hairdressers in xxx’, or ‘best hair salon for colour’. If the SEO on your website isn’t helping it to organically hit the top page of results for those searches, you can be sure your Google AdWords advert will.
This type of advertising is called pay-per-click (PPC) because you pay for every click to your site from the ad.
Use all the features at your disposal for best results such as, adding site-links which allow you to include up to six pages of your site, and don’t forget to beef your advert up by entering relevant keywords and search terms. Not getting any clicks? Try changing up your keywords to better focus the reach to your desired audience. See my blog on better Facebook advertising
Facebook advertising
Facebook advertising can be harder to master and convert an ‘interested party’ into becoming a physical customer spending money with your business. Facebook’s audiences are there to see what their friends and family are up to, watching the videos they’ve shared, and liking and reacting to their posts.
Though there is a service aspect to Facebook, what with groups and company pages being a big part of the social media platform, the audiences are generally there for entertainment purposes. Which means that in order to take someone away from their ‘entertainment’ it has to be for something special.
Facebook has more than 1.55 billion monthly active users. I’ll say that again, 1.55 – billion – monthly active users sharing almost every single detail of their daily lives with their network of friends and family.
Everything from meeting and marrying partners to career moves, the birth of children to everyday musings – all of life’s milestones, joys and sorrows are cemented into the digital world for everyone to see. Users also search for and consume content through Facebook that largely aligns with their personal interests, beliefs or ideas.
These entries from users are documented and, rightly or wrongly, used to put those individuals into categories that allow advertisers a unique opportunity to create and tailor advertising messaging to their ultimate target audience, those most likely to react to their advert.
There are various forms of advertising available with Facebook and finding what works for you and your business may take a bit of trying some out and seeing what happens, trial and error – if you will.
In January, I conducted my own advertisement experiment for my salon, BOB Salons, using Facebook’s Lead Generation ads, the results of which I would like to share with you. After all, since you’re reading this you’ll probably find them quite interesting and useful for your own campaigns.
Lead generation adverts are different to your traditional adverts. They look the same with an image and text but they don’t go to a landing page or website but with one click go to a prefilled form with the customer’s name, email address and mobile number. If the customer is interested in your offer then all they do is click submit and you have a warm lead ready to covert.
I trialled the lead generation ads by split testing with different audiences with the aim of finding out what type of audience our ads are more likely to reach.
Firstly I created three different audiences for my one single lead generation advert.
- Remarketing audiences that have had some connection with BOB Salons
- Local to Bracknell with a distance of 17km (minimum FB allow)
- RG postcodes near the salon that were affluent
I used a budget of £100 and split tested with each audience having a share of £36.66 for 14 days.
As you can see the RG postcodes were the winning audience resulting in 10 leads at a cost per lead of £3.67.
The leads are then saved to your Facebook page and from there you can send emails, or call them to arrange a booking.
I then created six different adverts going to the RG postcodes with the same budget and time frame.
As you can see from the results, the resounding winner was the advert with the picture of the interior of my salon. People responded better when they saw the salon, creating 17 leads at a cost of £2.63 per lead. A total lead count of 28 leads from these ads saw an average cost of £3.29.
I won’t get the full results from this experiment until March as this is still an ongoing process. My next stages will include sending an automated email to all new leads encouraging them to make a booking with the salon, those then that don’t book with us by a certain date, I will be on the phone with them seeing if we can get them booked in (the old fashioned way!).
Once the results are in, I will be sure to share them with you, but it also means that I wont have to do more split testing for a while as I, in theory, should end up with a budget and an advert that I know works with my target audience. Give it a try yourself by targeting slightly varying audiences to find what works best for you at this time to drive clients into your salon chairs.
Advertising costs money, but by strategic trial and error, you can quickly cut your advertising costs and see a much better ROI.
What marketing is working for you? Not sure? Perhaps you don’t know where to start? Let BOOSTmySALON become your very own marketing department, we can help you get started with your Facebook, Google or digital marketing, or even give you the benefit of our experience with some simple advice. Contact us today to get your marketing working for you!
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Carey
